Ditching Evernote? Check Out 5 Free Web Clipping Alternatives

Perish the thought. Why would you ditch Evernote? The one de facto tool that can take care of capturing, annotating, tagging, and organizing all the information that’s out there. If I am sounding too gung ho about this software, I am definitely not alone. Evernote has lots of uses to crow about.

But then the web space of web clipping tools and information managers is not Evernote’s alone. There are many more information chunking tools that are trying to grab a slice of the pie. For us users, it’s all the better because we get many more web clipping tools to play around with.

Online note-taking, web clipping tools are must have tools to keep in our browser toolset. The one advantage that some of these tools bestow is offline access to the saved pages. A bookmark may fail as the link changes, but if you have an offline facsimile stored in your hard drive, then that’s information you can use.

The five web clipping alternatives have their own good points in the way they catch and keep the information for us. Try them out and see if they can serve as good stand-ins as Evernote alternatives.

Clipmarks

Clipmarks allows you to clip just the things you want instead of saving the entire thing as a complete file. You can select sections of a webpage, pictures, text, and even videos and save them with their original links.

Clipmarks installs itself as a button in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Discrete sections of a webpage can be “˜clipped’ with orange boxes or text can be selected and clipped. A press of the Clip Button and your selected text, images, video and other types of information becomes a Clipmarks Clip for online storage on your Cliplog.

You can add your own tags and a title to each Clipmarks Clip. Clips can be kept private or shared through social media and email. A new Amplify It service also allows you to post it optionally on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and Clipmarks.com (Clipmarks’ own community site).

Clipmarks keeps count of your clips with a character meter. Each clip is limited to 1000 characters.

Marro is another web clipping/social bookmarking web application that follows the Firefox and IE browser extension route. But in contrast to Clipmarks, Marro also provides bookmarklets for other browsers like Opera, Chrome and Safari.

The Marro add-on for Firefox isn’t updated to the latest version of Firefox but you can make do with the bookmarklet. IE8’s accelerator from Marro works fine. The process is simple ““ select the section of the webpage (images and other media included), click on the Marro web clipping tool and you get a box as shown in the screenshot above. Add a tag and a URL alias which will be the pointer for the web clip.

The web clip is saved in your online account. You can choose to share it or keep it private.

To annotate the web clip, a text editor is also conveniently provided. The one distinct feature to like about Marro is that it allows the user to download the saved webpage as PDF, HTML, TXT, or as a DOC file.

Scrapbook is a Firefox add-on that lets you save snippets from webpages or a webpage or an entire website and manage all that in collections. Scrapbook operates as a browser sidebar with the collections arranged in a tree view (or a list view).

Scrapbook also has a lot of other tools that are quite handy at annotating the webpage or highlighting specific segments. You can choose to annotate a page before or after capture. Scrapbook also supports in-depth capture. One unique feature allows it to capture page with its linked media files.

All internal and external hyperlinks are retained in the capture. The filtered search also makes getting to all that stored information a lot easier.

Scrapbook is a great web clipping tool to have right in your browser. I won’t go into too much detail here, but direct you to our past coverage on this essential Firefox add-on that can be read here and here.

As a free Office and productivity suite, the set of applications from Zoho doesn’t lag behind. Zoho Notebook deserves a look as a great way to collect snippets of information as you browse the web. What makes Zoho Notebook is that it comes with browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome.

You can log into Zoho Notebook using your Google account. The browser plugins are one touch tools to collect information as you browse from one webpage to the other. The plugin installs on the right side of the status bar. On any webpage, select the text and right click. From the context menu, choose Add to Zoho Notebook. You can also drag and drop images into the notebook window that’s opened on the right corner of the browser window.

All the information can be bunched up in notebooks and pages. Zoho has integrated search which helps you to search in one notebook or across multiple notebooks. For smoother organization, you can also move information across the created pages and notebooks.

Zoho Notebook has a useful new found ability to export a single notebook page or an entire notebook as an HTML page. Using this you can easily export all the information to an application like Microsoft OneNote.

And Give A Thought To”¦

Microsoft OneNote

It’s right there as perhaps the most neglected of apps in the Microsoft Suite (though it’s not technically a free tool, in the sense of the word). Quite an injustice, when you consider that it has powerful web clipping functions. Microsoft Office Online has a great instructional on how to use Microsoft OneNote for web research.

OneNote itself has a Clip tool that can clip any part of the screen. Though the clip is pasted as an image only, a link to that page is added to the screen clipping.

To supplement OneNote’s tools, you can try out the experimental Mozilla Addon – Clip to OneNote. Though the results are not that clean cut, but the add-on makes sending of text and images a bit easier from Firefox to OneNote.

Managing information is a bulwark against information overload. Using plain and simple bookmarks is a basic way. Power users look for solutions beyond the click and go of bookmarks. Evernote is one of the better ones.

Which web clipping tools out of these five do you think could be an alternative?

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ericcov

I’ve been an Evernote user for years and have no plans on leaving – that said, springpad is the only service that has even tempted me to look at an alternative. Auto organization , product barcode scanning and location based lookup are some of the unique features that caught my eye.

ericcov

I’ve been an Evernote user for years and have no plans on leaving – that said, springpad is the only service that has even tempted me to look at an alternative. Auto organization , product barcode scanning and location based lookup are some of the unique features that caught my eye.

gabspoint

March 24, 2010

I have to say that Evernote it’s good. The reason I don’t use it it’s because it’s too heavy on the system (for a note-taking app).

They really need to shave off some of that installation files and folders, plus reduce memory footprint. Also, the database it’s proprietary. Otherwise, it’s got some impressive features.

Jeff Janer

March 25, 2010

Not only does Springpad’s clipper capture notes and bookmarks, it also tries to semantically detect what you’re saving in order to automatically organize it and enhance it with relevant and useful links (e.g. links to Open Table and Menu Pages for restaurants, local listings and showtimes for movies, price comparison for products, etc.).

The Chilibuddy

Josh Grossman

Jenny

March 25, 2010

I use Google Notebook (even though they dropped support) and Zoho Notebook for more “intensive” stuff. Springnote is a great alternative where you can create many notebooks, pages and tabs for different genres using a single username. Ibrii (Chrome extension) is a favourite for quick, short clips. All these are free.